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(1805–1850), poet and translator; born in Derry, he was educated in a hedge school in Millstreet, Co. Cork, becoming a school-master himself. In the 1830s he contributed nationalist verses to George Petrie's Dublin Penny Journal. He became a national schoolteacher but was dismissed from Glounthane in 1842 for publishing ‘What Is Repeal, Papa?’ in The Nation. In Dublin he met John O'Daly, the publisher who issued his Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844) in penny weekly parts. A collection of Jacobite lyrics, it contained many aislingí by 18th-cent. practitioners of the genre such as Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin. Walsh's metrical translations mirrored the assonance of the originals. Irish Popular Songs (1847), also published by O'Daly, was an anthology mainly of love-songs, again with faithful metrical versions by Walsh. He taught young convicts on Spike Island, where he met John Mitchel as he was being deported to Van Diemen's Land.

From The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature in Oxford Reference.